Game, set and match to ‘steely’ new chairman at Kate’s tennis club

Bad blood boiled over just before Christmas at the Hurlingham Club — despite the fact it’s where the duchess of Cambridge takes Prince George for tennis lessons.

So intense was the ill-feeling that the club’s new chairman, the Earl of Snowdon’s cousin Luke Nunneley, felt obliged to berate certain unnamed individuals who, he said, routinely ‘shouted down and insulted’ fellow members, and sent ‘abusive and insulting’ emails.

But on Monday night, at the club’s first ever annual general meeting to be conducted by Zoom, Nunneley decisively struck back against those whom he has characterised as ‘the noisiest and most bad-tempered of the membership’.

‘The Agm lasted two hours,’ a female member tells me, adding that Nunneley handled it with a ‘ steely confidence’, which helped him secure overwhelming support from members, who typically pay an annual subscription of £1,200.

almost 90 per cent of the 450 or so attending voted in favour of a new rule that will allow the committee to ‘ remove or suspend’ a committee member.

‘It was all very orderly,’ adds my informant. ‘No rancour, which made it unlike previous AGMS.’

The club in South-West London is set in 42 acres of idyllic grounds bordering the banks of the River Thames, and boasts of being ‘a green oasis of tradition’.

But it has been more like a battleground ever since the abandonment of a £22 million redevelopment — which landed the club with a bill for £2.55 million in professional fees and led to the departure of the previous chairman, Julian Holloway, whose allegedly ‘dictatorial’ manner inspired critics to compare him with North Korea’s Kim Jong- un and establish a website, ‘Reform Hurlingham’.

although the AGM was held ‘ remotely’, even the rowdiest of rebels was on best behaviour.

‘ No one “turned up” in sweaty sports gear. Hair had been brushed, make- up applied.’ Some had gone further. ‘They’d colour-coded their book shelves!’ Evidently the Nunneley effect.

‘He wore a pale blue, well ironed shirt, matching his blue eyes,’ swoons an admirer. ‘It was all encouraging and unifying — at long last.’

Sounds as though Nunneley could even be the man to heal the wounds of Megxit.